Neja's Art Walks

Neja's Art Walks Art historian and official Tate Modern guide offering private tours of Tate Modern, Tate Britain, the National Gallery, the V&A and London's major exhibitions.

Art historian and official Tate Modern guide offering private tours of London's leading art galleries and exhibitions.

Salman Toor (b.1983) is a Pakistani-born artist based in New York whose paintings often depict q***r brown men in ordina...
16/09/2026

Salman Toor (b.1983) is a Pakistani-born artist based in New York whose paintings often depict q***r brown men in ordinary, intimate scenes in America — texting, taking selfies, socialising in small apartments. He describes his characters as “the kind of people who sometimes succeed in merging irreconcilable ideas of the culturally Muslim immigrant, and the literary and artistic libertine in the Western tradition.”

I’ve long admired Toor’s work, and I’m very excited that an exhibition of his paintings is finally coming to London. If you’d like to join me for a guided walk through the exhibition, do get in touch.

I’m very excited about the forthcoming exhibition Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant: Inside Bloomsbury, opening at Tate Britai...
15/09/2026

I’m very excited about the forthcoming exhibition Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant: Inside Bloomsbury, opening at Tate Britain this autumn.

I’ll definitely be offering guided art walks of the exhibition, so if you’re interested, please do get in touch and plan ahead.

Some of you will know that I’m a huge fan of East Sussex. For the past five years, we’ve been going there regularly for short holidays, and during this time I’ve been lucky enough to visit Charleston, Farleys House (Lee Miller’s former home), Monk’s House (Virginia Woolf’s home) and many other places connected with the Bloomsbury circle of artists and writers.

I’d be very happy to share some of those insights and connections with you, and to put the exhibition into the wider context of the people, places and landscape that shaped Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury group.

In 1943, Peggy Guggenheim, following her separation from the artist Max Ernst, moved into an apartment at 155 East 61st ...
13/09/2026

In 1943, Peggy Guggenheim, following her separation from the artist Max Ernst, moved into an apartment at 155 East 61st Street, New York. In July, she commissioned Jackson Po***ck to paint a mural-scale canvas for the first-floor entrance of the building. The painting, which was to be the largest Po***ck had ever made, was completed by early November 1943. Peggy later donated it to the University of Iowa, where it remains today.

Mural’s explosive magnetism exerted a powerful influence on the emerging Abstract Expressionists and left a significant legacy for painters and sculptors as diverse as Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, David Smith and Richard Serra.

If you’d like to join our one-off special art walk at Tate Modern, dedicated to Mark Rothko on the occasion of his birthday on September 25th, at 7 p.m., please do get in touch.

William Morris called this pattern ‘Wandle’, after the River Wandle that ran past his Merton Abbey Works — “to honour ou...
10/09/2026

William Morris called this pattern ‘Wandle’, after the River Wandle that ran past his Merton Abbey Works — “to honour our helpful stream”. Its soft water was particularly important for dyeing textiles.

Morris spent years perfecting the ancient technique of indigo discharge printing. The entire fabric was first dyed in an indigo vat, then the design was printed using bleaching agents of different strengths. The dye was washed away from the treated areas, gradually revealing the pattern.

This example shows ‘Wandle’ after its first application, before the other colours were added. The white areas have been fully discharged, while the pale blue areas show where a weaker discharging agent was used.

I love how much of Morris’s design process is actually hidden in this seemingly simple blue-and-white pattern — chemistry, water, craftsmanship and a very particular stretch of the River Wandle all coming together.

Lee Krasner, Gothic Landscape, 1961.This is currently the only work by Krasner in a public collection in the UK, at Tate...
07/09/2026

Lee Krasner, Gothic Landscape, 1961.

This is currently the only work by Krasner in a public collection in the UK, at Tate Modern. It was purchased by Tate in 1981.

It belongs to Krasner’s series of large “Umber” paintings, made between 1959 and 1962. These are abstract, gestural paintings, worked in a deliberately restricted palette of burnt umber, brown, cream and white. Krasner explained that she had been suffering from insomnia and began working at night; because she disliked dealing with colour under artificial light, she eliminated it almost entirely.

Born in Brooklyn in 1908, she studied at Cooper Union, the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design, and later with Hans Hofmann. She was involved with the American Abstract Artists group from the 1930s and had her first solo exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1951.

Her work moved through several distinct phases: the dense Little Image paintings of the late 1940s, collage in the 1950s, the Umber paintings around 1959–62, and then a return to much brighter colour and more expansive forms in the 1960s. In 1965, the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London gave her the first retrospective of her work.

Krasner died in 1984. She is now recognised as a major figure of Abstract Expressionism, although for much of her career her work was discussed in the shadow of Po***ck.

A client asked for a tour centred on Rothko, which led me to René Magritte’s The Man with a Newspaper (1928) — and then,...
04/09/2026

A client asked for a tour centred on Rothko, which led me to René Magritte’s The Man with a Newspaper (1928) — and then, via a comment under an Instagram post (“This is Phillip Jeffries outside and inside his residence 🔥”), to Twin Peaks.

Phillip Jeffries is the FBI agent played by David Bowie in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). He disappears in Buenos Aires while investigating the mysterious Judy, then suddenly reappears in the FBI offices in Philadelphia — apparently years earlier, with no idea what year it is, before disappearing again.

By Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), Jeffries has lost his human form altogether. He exists inside a strange, steam-emitting kettle-like machine, somewhere outside ordinary time and space.

Bowie was unable to return to Twin Peaks: The Return, but gave Lynch permission to reuse his footage from Fire Walk with Me, on the condition that Jeffries be dubbed by a Louisiana actor.

I really never know where my research is going to take me.

I recently accidentally stumbled upon the work of Rudolph Ihlee (1883–1968), an artist I'd never come across before. A p...
01/09/2026

I recently accidentally stumbled upon the work of Rudolph Ihlee (1883–1968), an artist I'd never come across before. A prize-winning student at London's prestigious Slade School of Fine Art, where he studied alongside Stanley Spencer (one of my favourite British artists), he later settled in Collioure in the south of France. The same small fishing town attracted artists such as Henri Matisse and André Derain, who helped launch Fauvism there in 1905. Ihlee spent decades painting its luminous Mediterranean landscapes. It's fascinating how an artist so highly regarded early in his career can almost disappear from the art historical canon.

A visit to Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar — a museum of modern and contemporary art founded by Dutch collector and busin...
01/09/2026

A visit to Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar — a museum of modern and contemporary art founded by Dutch collector and businessman Joop van Caldenborgh, whose collection has been built up over some six in decades. The museum opened in September 2016.

The museum itself was designed by Kraaijvanger Architects and the setting is fascinating in its own right. Voorlinden is a historic country estate whose origins go back to the 17th century. In the 18th century it was owned by the Portuguese banking family Lopes Suasso. The present manor house was commissioned in 1912 by Hugo Loudon and designed by British architect R. J. Johnston.

Unfortunately, the museum was in an installation period, so much of it was closed. Still, there was plenty to see, including Anselm Kiefer’s Jericho, two monumental concrete towers standing in the landscape, as well as works by Richard Serra, James Turrell, Jan Fabre and the Maman.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) was one of the founders of German Expressionism and the driving force behind Die Brück...
29/08/2026

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) was one of the founders of German Expressionism and the driving force behind Die Brücke ("The Bridge"), the revolutionary artists' group that rejected academic tradition in favour of raw emotion, bold colour and distorted forms.

His paintings of Berlin's bustling streets captured both the excitement and the anxiety of modern city life, while his haunting Self-Portrait as a Soldier became one of the defining images of the psychological trauma of the First World War.

Branded a "degenerate artist" by the N***s, more than 600 of his works were removed from German museums in 1937. Deeply affected by the campaign against his art, Kirchner died by su***de in Switzerland the following year.

One of his paintings is currently on display at Tate Modern. If you'd like to discover Kirchner in the wider context of modern art—and uncover the fascinating stories behind the artists who transformed the 20th century—why not join one of NEJA's Art Walks at Tate Modern? I'd love to show you around.

Frida Kahlo is best known for her self-portraits, but in the final decade of her life she also painted a remarkable seri...
25/08/2026

Frida Kahlo is best known for her self-portraits, but in the final decade of her life she also painted a remarkable series of still lifes.

Far from being simple studies of fruit and flowers, these works are filled with symbolism. Watermelons, papayas, coconuts, prickly pears and other native Mexican fruits become metaphors for life, fertility, abundance and mortality. Some compositions also include birds, flowers, flags and handwritten inscriptions, inviting multiple interpretations.

Kahlo's still lifes reflect her deep appreciation of Mexican folk art and her commitment to celebrating the country's indigenous culture and traditions. They also reveal how she continued to experiment with colour, composition and symbolism, even as chronic pain increasingly limited her mobility.

As her health deteriorated in the 1940s and early 1950s, still lifes became a more frequent subject. Rather than turning away from painting, Kahlo transformed familiar objects into powerful reflections on the human condition. Her final work, Viva la Vida (Watermelons), completed just eight days before her death in 1954, is perhaps the best-known example.

If you'd like to explore these works and many others, get in touch to book a guided visit to the current Frida Kahlo exhibition at Tate Modern.

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